LMN Case study University of Westminster

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LMN Case studyUniversity of Westminster

• Neil Englefield
• Systems Manager
• Information Systems and Library Services

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University of Westminster

• Founded in 1838 as Britains first Polytechnic
  (the Royal Polytechnic Institution)
• 10 Schools on 4 campuses (West End and Harrow)
• More than 22,000 students of whom 75 are
  undergraduates  
• More than 4,000 international students from over
  160 overseas nations

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ISLS integrated organisation
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Environment September 2004

• Sites connected via a meshed 100Mb network
• One primary data centre, with 5 satellites
  centres for Novell services
• Running Legato successfully for
• Solaris
• Microsoft
• Novell Netware

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First impressions of InTechnologys offerings
(September 2004)

• Seemed expensive when compared to existing
  service
• Did not provide any obvious benefits

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Problems in 2004

• For the start of the 2004 academic year we had
  moved to using 7x 2 node Netware clusters
• Initial work with Legato seemed OK, but problems
  started to appear during the first few months
• Main issue - backups were not reliable when they
  ran, and did not always complete

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Options

• Replace existing Legato service
• or
• Additional service just for Netware
• or
• InTechnologys Vbak Plus service

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Next step - Pilot

• Pilot is broken down into 2 parts.
• Initial onsite backup of a single cluster
  (started January 2005)
• When successful relocate this backup server to
  InTechnology and continue the backup cycle via
  LMN connection

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Success

• The pilot service delivered everything as needed
• We proceeded to internal financial discussions
  and agreements and converted the pilot into
  production
• By Feburary 2005 the remaining 6 clusters were
  migrated from Legato to Vbak Plus

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Disaster strikes April 2005

• Less than 2 months after final installation, one
  of our Netware cluster crashed due to disk
  failures - resulted in an unrecoverable file
  system
• Only solution was to restore from the new backups
• All data was recovered within 5 days

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Lessons learned

• Better understanding of the full restore
  methods available during pilot (web vs command
  line client)
• Contact InTechnology for a DR unit to be brought
  onsite (with our backup tapes)
• Restores, can be run in parallel

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Issues since

• Due to an increased number of files, the backups
  started to run slow (beyond 24 hours at one
  point)
• Client Configurations
• Backup Schedules

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Benefits

• Working backups
• Automatic off-site backups
• Drop in staff time in managing backup service
  (changing tapes)
• Unexpected benefit - the local IT Helpdesks were
  able to use the TSM Webclient for restores

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Environment July 07

• Sites are connected via a meshed 1Gb network
• Now operating out of 2 data centres located in
  the West End and at Harrow
• Using Vbak, Vbak Plus Legato

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July 07

• Vbak plus
• 5x Netware cluster
• Currently investigating its use with Sun Solaris
  NFS (user home areas) and Suse Linux (mail boxes)

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Vbak Plus - Total GB
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Vbak Plus - Number of files
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July 07

• Vbak
• Microsoft Servers - IIS, SQL, Exchange
• supporting applications such as Blackboard, SAP,
  Agresso
• Solaris and SUSE Linux
• supporting applications such as - Strata, Aleph,
  Prophecy
• Investigating the Exchange plug-in for individual
  mail box restores.

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Vbak - Total GB
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Vbak - Chargeable data (GB)
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Final Thought

• InTechnologys services may not appear cheap to
  start with, but when you consider the benefits of
  having automatic, externally stored backups, that
  workit does balance out

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Finally

• Thank you for your attention
• Happy for anyone to contact me / visit ISLS or UW
• n.englefield_at_westminster.ac.uk